


esperance

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Mulholland Drive (2001)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Happier Than The Movie That's For Sure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-05 14:34:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12191793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: “We’ll call tomorrow.”





	esperance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laughingpineapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/gifts).



“It’s strange calling yourself,” Betty said, the phone cool and unforgiving against her ear as she clung to it. Her heart thrashed against the wall of her chest in an urgent, desperate bid to escape. But she couldn’t bring herself to let Rita know, Rita who deserved to find out the truth of her own life, Rita for whom Betty would do anything. Under other circumstances, circumstances in which Betty felt comfortable with the truth, she might have said it frightened her.

Pain lanced between her eyes; red flashed across her field of vision; for one moment, she thought that heart of hers would shred itself into a thousand pieces. Diane, Diane, Diane, hot as spurts of blood. The syllables drove themselves into the wrinkled pockets of Betty’s mind, flooded the crevices of her thoughts with slime.

Diane, Diane, Diane.

“What is it?” Rita asked, quiet, her voice a bare sigh. Stitched in place with fear, the words scarcely crossed her lips. But Betty was already so attuned to Rita that something like the failure of sound waves to cross the scant distance between them hardly constituted an obstacle.

The phone rang and rang and rang and Betty was suddenly very sure that she didn’t want to hear whoever might be on the other end. Her palm, slick with sweat, shook and gripped all the tighter to the cheap, creaking casing. You can do it, she mouthed to herself, eyes closing. For Rita.

“Betty?” Rita said, her voice now too loud. The concern in it pierced the cloud of Betty’s fevered anxieties, cut through it like a knife made of ice. She reached across Betty’s lap, stretched her small, yet strong, form and slapped the phone from her hand. It clattered to the floor, loud against the thin carpet that covered the hardwood floors. Her perfume tickled at Betty’s nose. Betty wanted to bury her face in Rita’s sleek, soft hair, nuzzle at the cascade of smooth strands, push pieces behind Rita’s ear and…

She was so beautiful. The realization snatched Betty’s breath from her lungs and replaced it with a raging forest fire, too all consuming to be understood or parsed, but still somehow preferable to facing Diane Selwyn.

“You’re scaring me.” Rita again. It was a clarification that Betty didn’t need. Wide and glinting, Rita’s eyes reflected back at Betty the same fears that plagued her.

“We—” Betty swallowed. Her twin desires to help and to hide warred inside of her. They trampled a path around her gut that would never be quite the same again. A scream of frustration pulled at her throat, souring her mouth. She didn’t want to disappoint Rita, but she didn’t want to do this either. “We could wait? Give it another day?”

“Another day.” Distant, a little distracted, Rita nodded. Her gaze cut across Betty’s face and down to her lips, lingering there until heat pooled in Betty’s stomach, shy and abashed, barely heat at all with how nervous it made Betty. “Let’s do that.”

Betty’s eyes fell to her hands. They sat calm, upturned, in her lap, the last jitter of nerves bleeding from them as Rita freed her from this task even if only for a little while. Her cheeks reddened, her pale skin betraying her and giving away all her secrets. She was an actress—or would be if she had her way. Her body should serve her better than it did, give away only what she wanted it to and no more. She should be better at controlling herself. She should…

A knock at the door interrupted her thoughts, loud as a clap of thunder, sudden enough to startle her. Rita didn’t budge, but the expressiveness of her eyes gave her away. The noise had startled her, too.

“I’ll get that,” Betty said. “Just—stay put.” She held up her hands for a moment in a warding gesture meant, she supposed, to ensure Rita did just that. Like Rita would disappear if she didn’t do something to stop it from happening. And Betty would. She would do anything she had to do to keep Rita safe and happy.

After a few moments, she returned with a half-plastic grin on her face and a handful of pages in her fist: her audition homework. Louise’s warning zipped and bounced through the crowded, tangled corridors of her uneasiness. Even Coco’s assurances weren’t quite enough to assuage her. But a distraction, a distraction might just work.

They’d be fine. Everything would be fine.

“Do you want to help me with my audition?” she asked, an olive branch for both of them, a respite, an island. Rita could say no if she wanted to.

A smile broke splashed across the shores of Rita’s jaw. Mischievous joy bubbled over her like seafoam and she jumped to her feet, pulled the scene from Betty’s hand to scan each word with hungry eyes. “Yes,” she said. Laughing, she read the scene again. “Yes.”

*

“We’ll call her tomorrow,” Betty assured Rita as she slid into Betty’s bed that night. Her presence warmed Betty; it felt so right to have her here. Perhaps Betty should have been embarrassed. Girls from Deep River, Ontario didn’t invite other women into their beds, and not fully nude women. Certainly not _that_.

“We’ll call her tomorrow,” Rita agreed, her eyes dark and intent and longing. Just like Betty’s.

“I…” Betty should have looked away. It wasn’t right to stare, but Rita was beautiful and so warm and _there_ and…

And Betty couldn’t _not_ reach for her. Rita was like the law of gravity, powerful and undeniable on the human scale. Each individual particle of Betty might have withstood her onslaught independent of every other particle, but the whole?

For the whole, Rita was inevitable.

So she reached. And reached.

And Rita reached right back. Her hands were as soft as her hair and delicately scented. Betty couldn’t help but brush a kiss against the plush pillow of her palm. It felt like the only thing she’d wanted to do all her life even though she’d never known she needed it before.

Betty had never been so happy in her life.

*

“We’ll call tomorrow.”

“We’ll call tomorrow.”

“We’ll call tomorrow.”

They didn’t call tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after that after that after that after that after that.

*

They stopped telling each other they’d call tomorrow.

They lost track of how long ago it was they ever considered doing such a foolish thing when everything was going so well here and now.

They’d never been so happy in their lives.


End file.
